Okay. She doesn’t need to point out how transparent I am.
“He’s a bit touchy,” Spencer replies lightly. “Don’t take it personally.”
“Don’t worry, I never do.” She winks at me, and I snarl in response. She laughs and then says, “Mav is downstairs with your girl. She’s pretty.”
Save me from chaotic bisexuals. “She’s dead.”
“They’re not mutually exclusive.” She leads us through the short hallways of the funeral home to the more clinical back area. The white walls are claustrophobia inducing. Good thing it doesn’t bother me. “I bet she had a nice smile. Explains why she had a stalker. I hope you’re planning on puttinghimsix feet under.” She says it so casually, like she’s talking about her dinner plans. These are the people I surround myself with.
“What makes you think it was a stalker?” I ask, following her first down the stairs to the morgue, Spencer close behind.
“The candles in the bathroom? The romantic atmosphere? None of that says impersonal to me. I bet if Spencer killed you, he’d leave candles. Even put on some disgustingly sweet music for you to drift off to, and the cops to find.”
“I would,” Spencer agrees, leaning down from where he’s standing on a stair above me, and kissing my cheek. It’s worlds different than when he’d kissed her. He lingers and even touches the tip of his tongue to my skin, a light flick. He moves across and down to my jaw, nibbling and tasting. I can’t help but turn my head, our lips meeting again. He sinks his tongue into my mouth. Now that the gate is open, he’s just waltzing right in. I wish I could say no to him, to this, knowing how much it will destroy me, but I can’t. Tangling my fingers in his hair, I deepen the kiss, swallowing all the small sounds he’s making.
The sound of the thick door at the base of the steps shutting with a loudbangjolts me out of it, forcing me to lift my head.
“Spence…” What the hell is happening with us? Even as attached as we’ve always been, he’s never beenthistactile. Never teased me to this extent. There’s a cruel edge to it that I don’t appreciate. And one I’m reaching for even as I curse his name.
He doesn’t respond, only nudges my back to get me moving again.
Maverick isn’t standing near the body that is laid out on a mobile examination table pushed against the wall. Instead, he’s at a small administration nook on the opposite side of the room, lounging on a chair with one leg lifted and resting over the corner of the desk. “You’re late,” he says in his rough, gravelled voice, without looking up. He’s never touched a cigarette his entire life—as far as I know—but he’s always sounded like a serial smoker.
“We didn’t specify a time,” Spencer says. “If you’d wanted us on time, you should have sent a more enticing invitation. One with flowers.”
“He’s in a romantic mood,” Abigail stage-whispers.
Ignoring them, I approach the corpse. Veronica Fergusion looks the same as she had in her pictures. Nothing like the vibrant, smiling photos that accompanied the rest of the files. A life snuffed out too soon. By all accounts, she’d been moving up in the world, taking names and accomplishing her dreams. I’ll find supreme satisfaction in putting her killer down. Jail’s too good for scum like this. Abigail isn’t wrong in that regard.
Maverick rises to his full height of six foot seven, a solid guy more akin to a battering ram than a person. Shaved head, tattoos covering his shiny scalp. They carry down to his neck, and from what I’ve seen of him shirtless, cover every inch of skin.
Abigail flicks off the safeties and wheels Veronica into the centre of the room, giving us space to move around her.
Maverick tosses me a box of gloves, and I peel out two before handing it over to Spencer to do the same. His fingers drag across the back of my hand as he takes it. He’s pushing his luck tenfold today. Telling him to stop would be futile, and I don’t want to. I’m self-aware enough to know how weak I am for him.
Spencer steps closer and stares solemnly at Veronica’s face, his lips turned down contemplatively. “Who killed you, Veronica?”
The idea that someone she trusted did this to her makes fury roar inside me like a storm that won’t abate. To put that kind of faith in a person, enough to allow them that close while so vulnerable, and to have them turn around and abuse it… boundaries crossed and broken trust. I’ve killed people for less.
There’s only one person I allow that close to me, that I allow into the heart of my life. Spencer has all the tools to destroy me. I open the door and let him walk right in without an invitation. The idea that he would use that against me, would turn itonme, is unfathomable. It would break me. Death would be a relief. I’d welcome it with arms wide open.
Is that what happened to her? Once she realised what was happening, did the fight go out of her? No. The evidence doesn’t support that theory. Neither does the bruising still present across her throat. Something else happened in that room.
“Fingerprints here.” Easy to see the outlines of where he’d held her around the throat. He didn’t care about leaving the evidence.
“Here as well,” Spencer sees, the tip of his finger tracing another hand-shaped bruise over her side. Hovering without touching.
I place my hands in both positions, judging the distance and what kind of force would be needed. “He strangled her and kept her underwater by holding her throat and then here to stop her struggling. What about her hands?” There aren’t any bruises there, or any wounds that might indicate drugging. “She wouldn’t have been passively allowing him to kill her.” The water all over the bathroom floor corroborates that theory. “Was there anything under her fingernails?”
“No,” Maverick says. “But there were traces of cleaning products. Antiseptic and light burns indicative of bleach. She most definitely fought back, and he made sure there wasn’t any trace of himself left.”
Enough sense to clean up after himself, but not enough to do it without obvious bruising? There’s a cruel deliberateness to it. He wanted someone to find the wounds, to know he’d killed her.
“Clever motherfucker.” Spencer frowns and holds her hand, lifting it up so he can turn her and check underneath. “That kind of thought… not his first kill.”
“Or he watches too much TV,” I say dryly. Everyone’s a homicide expert these days. Or they like to think they are. I’m inclined to agree with Spencer, though. It stinks of a process perfected, and that takes more than one murder. “He cleaned the apartment the same way, which makes it all but impossible to trace him through DNA.”
“We should get Greer to do a search for any kills similar in the state. Start with unsolved murders and go from there.”
